LETTERS The pseudo-countrymen
From Annabel Barber Sir: No, I don't think the posthumous voice of Wiffiam Cobbett is being jammed (Letters, 8 April). I think Ross Clark's attractive deter- mination not to be snobbish about British suburbia has in this case affected his ability to analogise. His quotation from Cobbett's Kent ride rails precisely against the kind of people who want to crazy-pave their own half-acre and ramble in someone else's wilderness. What labourer ever rambled? The Paradise Placers still exist today, but they are not (and never were) the farmers and landowners.
They are the people who purchase rural properties in the Vale of Usk and then raise a hue and cry about horse manure on the roads, who move to villages in Oxford- shire and get themselves involved in trying to close down the school because 'the chil- dren make too much noise', and complain that the crowing cocks disturb their morn- ing slumbers (three real examples). The United Kingdom is cross-hatched with pub- lic footpaths; apparently these are not suffi- cient. But the people clamouring for more access are not labourers wanting to walk from A to B, and certainly not starving wretches hoping to poach a hare. They are picnickers who want to 'enjoy' landscapes that haven't been turned into carparks. That's fine. But why does it have to be accompanied by so much moral high-and- mightyism? There are people who seem to imagine that the 'countryside' (a silly, vague concept, anyway) is somehow theirs by right to use for recreation, as if it were a sort of rural equivalent of the National Gallery with landowners operating as custodians. But when those same people go to the National Gallery and one of the custodians tells them not to touch the paintings, they back off docilely, happy to accept that it is a reasonable rule made for a valid purpose by people who know more about paintings than they do.
Annabel Barber somerset@pronet.hu
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